Here’s what I see on YouTube: men working with preternatural, focused speed to trowel grooves into the red clay they stand on. The grooves form a gridded shape. They carry a steaming crucible of molten iron to the marked place and pour it onto the earth – just beside their unshod feet. Minutes later they are lifting up a just-made section of iron gate. This takes place, I gather, in India. It’s a process that has immense appeal – carve and pour – what satisfying immediacy! Connecting Iron to gates is, for me, one of the most immediate material associations I have. Brooklyn is full of them. If Manhattan is your more familiar environ, you might think of the cast iron facades of Soho. Iron gates and grilles also connect to another process I’ve been thinking about recently – bound glass. This is an Italian technique for creating bulbous, multi-lobed glass forms. A metal cage is prepared and the molten glass blown into this cage until it becomes a swollen expression of negative space. It was with these two processes in mind, and in combination, that I made Illumination Machines 3, 4, and 5.